The Cowboy's Big Family Tree

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Clementine’s hand stilled on the wooden spoon and she glanced up. Dylan Patterson, the eighteen-year-old line cook, was smiling gently at her.

“Don’t all the best cooks, you included, Dylan, say you should put your emotion into your cooking?” Clementine asked.

“Not anxiety,” her sister Annabel whispered with compassion in her voice as she passed by Clementine en route to the walk-in refrigerator. “Instead, you’re supposed to tell your sister everything that’s bugging you,” she added with a commiserating smile.

“Sisters,” Georgia said, nodding at Clementine from where she stood at the baking station. Even over the aroma of onions and peppers sautéing, Clementine could smell the first batch of biscuits baking. Georgia reached a floury hand to her belly. Her almost eight-months-pregnant belly. “That was some kick,” she said laughing.

“I expect that little kicker to be one of my lead marchers in the holiday show in two years,” Clementine said, hoping to keep the subject off herself and her mad stirring.

Georgia was due in late January. When Clementine thought her life was complicated she’d think back to what Georgia had gone through last spring and summer, first with an obsessed boyfriend who turned stalker then with a secret pregnancy—Detective Nick Slater’s child. A good man who was now her husband. Georgia and Nick were responsible for bringing Dylan, their young cook, into Hurley’s. Last summer they’d taken care of the then seventeen-year-old’s newborn son for a week since he was afraid social services would come take his baby away. Clementine tried to remember that opening up was key, that keeping your troubles to yourself would make for stomachaches and awful sauces. But she had finally opened up to her sisters about Logan last summer and though talking about it had helped, nothing made her heart feel better. And now, how could she talk about her and Logan’s conversation last night? That was his private business.

“Mine too,” Annabel said, patting her own pregnant belly. Annabel was due in early March. The Hurleys were all beside themselves that another generation of Hurleys was on the way. “And Lucy is so excited to be in the show,” Annabel added, carrying a carton of eggs back to her station where she was working on one of the Saturday lunch specials, ham and cheese frittatas. Annabel’s stepdaughter, Lucy, was adorable and one of Clementine’s most energetic singers.

Essie Hurley came into the kitchen and tied on her yellow apron. “Madelyn Parker just called. She’s wants to hold her book club luncheon here at 12 noon. Better get another two cartons of eggs out, Annabel.”

Saturday lunch at Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen was always busy. Clementine tasted her Creole sauce, declared it a B-and asked her Gram to try it.

“Clementine, it’s delicious. Tiny bit more garlic next time, but absolutely great.”

“Good to hear because my aunt is coming in for lunch today and she loves her spicy gumbo with Creole sauce,” Dylan said as he dredged steak in flour for his amazing chicken-fried steak.

“So let’s get to work!” Essie said.

With her sauce ready for the cooks, Clementine headed out into the dining room to check on the table settings and make sure the salt and pepper shakers and hot sauce jars were full. Despite working in this room since was a teenager, Clementine loved it. The wide-planked wood floors, the lemon yellow beadball walls with black-and-white photographs of Blue Gulch through the years and family photographs lining the doorway to the kitchen. The tables, some round, some square, were glass and each was decorated with an orange vase of wildflowers that Clementine picked every morning from the field beyond the backyard.

Clementine felt eyes on her and glanced out the window toward Blue Gulch Street. Lacey Woolen, her birth mother, stood there, foam cup of coffee in her hand. She wore her usual long skirt and cowboy boots, her long, graying dark hair in a braid down one shoulder. Lacey looked away when Clementine waved.

She wanted to march out there and shout, What? What, what, what? Why do you come here practically every day to stare at me through the window, something you’ve been doing since I was eight years old? Why not say something? Why not come in and ask me to take a walk with you? Have lunch. Dinner. Anything. Something. Lacey Woolen was so frustrating that Clementine wanted to scream.

“Maybe she’ll come to Christmas dinner this year,” Essie said from behind Clementine, her warm hands on Clementine’s shoulders.

Clementine sighed. “I’ve given up on having expectations.”

Her gram patted her shoulders and headed back into the kitchen.

Problem was, Clementine hadn’t given up. She still had expectations. Hopes. She watched as Lacey turned to walk away, glancing at Clementine. They held each other’s gazes for just a moment before Lacey continued walking.

The next time someone asked Clementine what she wanted for Christmas, she was going to say: the ability to read minds. Oh and not care so much what was on those minds.

* * *

At just after noon, Logan stood in the barn, tilting his head at the horses’ Christmas tree. A laugh bubbled up inside him, but he squelched it back. He was surprised the tree, laden with every possible piece of tinsel and ornament, was still standing and hadn’t toppled over from the weight.

“We’re done!” Harry said, bits of tinsel in his blond hair. “Will the horses like it?”

Logan nodded and knelt down between the boys who stood admiring their tree. “I think they’ll love it. In fact, why don’t we lead Winnie out and see what she thinks.” Winnie was a pony, a gift from West Montgomery, Clementine’s brother-in-law and a fellow rancher. West had given Logan the pony last spring after his brother’s and Mandy’s funeral, and the twins adored the sweet speckled little horse meant to comfort them.

Logan opened Winnie’s stall, the boys excited at his side.

“Come on, Winnie. Look at your tree!” Harry said.

Logan led the brown-and-white pony out of the stall and stopped a few feet from the tree. He smiled at the homemade star both boys had worked on together. The glitter on the coffee table was proof of their handiwork.

“What if she eats it?” Henry asked, looking up at Logan. “What if she thinks the red stuff is apples?”

There was so much red tinsel wrapped around the small tree that it was entirely possible Winnie would mistake the tree for a giant apple and take a bite. But she didn’t. She stood there looking at.

“She likes it,” Harry said. “I can tell.”

“Me too,” Henry agreed.

God, he loved these boys. Harry wore his Batman cape, and Henry had some kind of big spy goggles atop his head. Logan knelt back down and hugged them both against them, keeping a hand on Winnie’s lead. They’d changed his life and kept him busier on all fronts than he’d ever been in his life, but he loved them like crazy and was grateful that they had each other. The twins might be only three, but they’d taught him about a thing or two about holding on and staying the course in the face of grief and fear. He’d needed to be strong for them instead of falling apart at the losses in his life, the changes. Because of them, he’d stayed grounded.

He’d better start dealing with this thing about Parsons or it would eat him up inside. He had no room in his life for that. He had to be here and present for his nephews, especially now at Christmastime. At Thanksgiving dinner last week, just the three of them this year, they’d gone around the table saying what they were grateful for, and Harry had said he was grateful for his uncle Logan and the ponies, and Henry had said “me too.” Logan had had to squeeze his eyes shut at the tears that had pricked.

“And I’m grateful for you wonderful boys, my Harry and my Henry,” Logan had said.

“And for Crazy Joe?” Harry had asked, swiping a bite of turkey in gravy.

“And for Crazy Joe,” Logan had said, glancing out the window and able to just make out Crazy Joe, an old rodeo bull, grazing in the far pasture.

He’d thought about that fifteen second conversation for days. Him. The twins. The ponies. Crazy Joe. It was so easy to be grateful for what was good and special in your life, what mattered most to you. He had to remember that, hold on to it. Three-year-olds magically kept his head level. He needed to keep that Thanksgiving conversation looping around his mind to stay with the here and now and stop letting this damned thing with Parsons take over his life and thoughts. He was the same person he was three months and a day ago.

Except, dammit, he wasn’t. But he still had to figure out how to live with it, how not to let it consume him.

“Let’s go wash up for lunch at Hurley’s,” he said, putting that train of circular thought out of his mind as he led the pony back to her stall. “I hear one of today’s specials is the mac and cheese.”

The boys zoomed out of the barn toward the house, Harry’s Batman cape flying in Henry’s face, which made him trip into Harry’s path. Both ended up falling. Harry kicked at Henry; Henry kicked back at Harry.

“Dummy!” Harry shouted.

“Bigger dummy!” Henry yelled.

“Guys,” Logan said. “How we’d go from being excited about going to Hurley’s for mac and cheese to calling each other names?”

They shouted at each other for another ten seconds.

“Well, what are you going to do about this problem?” Logan asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Let’s make up so we can have mac and cheese,” Henry said to his brother.

“I’m getting lemonade with mine,” Harry responded.

“I’m getting chocolate milk,” Henry said as they both flew into the house.

Resolution. If only his own problems could be taken care of so simply and easily.

He followed the twins inside the house. “We have about a half hour before it’s time to head over, so why don’t you play a bit?”

The boys ran over to their blocks area and started stacking. Stacking and then running full speed into their block-walls was among their favorite pastimes.

Solution. Having a problem. Doing something about it. Right now his problem was that he was driving himself crazy and needed to know something more about Clyde Parsons than he did. Over the past few months he’d thought about people his mother might have confided in, but Ellie Grainger had always been so private that he couldn’t imagine her telling such a personal thing to the few friends she’d had, such as their nearest neighbor at the ranch he’d grown up on, Delia Cooper, who was very chatty and social. His mother didn’t have any siblings to open up to, either. She’d probably kept the information to herself.

Go over to the computer and type in Clyde T. Parsons and Tuckerville and see what comes up, he told himself.

Maybe he has family, he recalled Clementine saying.

That’s of no concern to me, he recalled himself snapping back.

And it wasn’t, he reminded himself. But he did have low-level basic curiosity about the man who’d fathered him. Did Parsons have siblings? Parents? Other children?

Not that they were any kin of his. Just because you shared DNA didn’t make you family. Being there made you family. Giving a damn made you family. Taking responsibility made you family. But that DNA meant something in and of itself. Unfortunately. He shook his head at how danged complicated the whole thing was. Was, wasn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, should, shouldn’t, is, isn’t. What the hell had happened to things being black or white? Gray areas were murky. Logan hated murky.

He forced himself over to the laptop computer on the living room desk and sat down. In the search bar, he typed in Clyde T. Parsons and Tuckerville, Texas, and hit Enter.

An obituary came up. A short obituary.

Clyde T. Parsons, Tuckerville: Clyde Turnbull Parsons was born on September 3, 1966 in Austin, Texas, to Dotty and Delmont Parsons, who predeceased him. A traveling man who supported himself as a ranch hand, Clyde lived all over the state of Texas and spent the last two years in Tuckerville. A funeral is scheduled for Sunday, August 27 at three o’clock in the afternoon at the Tuckerville Funeral Home.